10 ways to guide people with design

Jenn Tang explains how designers can pull emotional and cognitive strings to guide users through their products and drive engagement

Have you ever wondered how sites like Facebook or apps like Snapchat get users to come back again and again? It’s not magic; whether they know it or not, they are using psychological tools that play on our emotions and biological instincts.

Liquid Dreams

When you look at where we’ve come from, the modern LCD panel is a wondrous achievement. Not too long ago we had CRT monitors that literally took up half your desktop real estate but thankfully now we have larger, clearer and higher fidelity screens that take up hardly any room at all.

Convoy

When a friend described Convoy to me as “Mad Max meets FTL” it was, obviously, a must play. Somehow, the 2015 release, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, had passed me by unnoticed. Generally, despite the recommendation, I wouldn’t hold a game to another game (or film’s) standards, but Convoy’s Steam page does cite these two greats as influences and I got over-excited. I wish I’d played it with no expectations.

Shardlight

I didn’t want Shardlight to end. I played it over three nights and I missed it profusely when it was over. Why? I wanted more of just being there, which is an odd thing to say about most post-apocalyptic settings. Twenty years after Blast Day, people are lean and ravaged by Green Lung. As well as accepting dangerous work for tickets in the vaccine lottery, however, they make pottery, restore cars and genuinely band together as a community of friends.

The Slaughter: Act One

It wasn’t until I was the guy reluctantly in a dress, ready to break a barstool over another guy who had made a racist slur about a third guy, that I truly had a sense of all the narrative threads converging in The Slaughter: Act One. It’s a Jack the Ripper story, but one told in a way that is completely unexpected. I came to care immensely about everyone and their imperfect contexts. The humiliation I felt as my character vomited, publicly, was real.